A deal is near for DirecTV and the NFL, according to multiple reports including CBSSports.com.

What are they bargaining over? The NFL Sunday Ticket that lucrative draw for football fans who enjoy having every single football game at their control on Sunday afternoons along with a couple of other goodies to enhance the experience of fantasy football addicts.

The cost? Only a cool $1.3 to $1.4 billion per year until 2022, according to reports. Yes, the NFL is indeed king and it makes you wonder how the savvy businessmen who run it actually believe they can get away with selling their halftime show to an act they deem worthy while collecting huge sums of cash from broadcasters.

With an AT&T-DirecTV merger looming, the latter party needs the deal to go through. Without it, there’s not a whole lot that DirecTV offers that you can’t get with a good video provider.

Football is indeed front and center in the pact. ESPN now owns the rights to every MAC-controlled football game for the next 13 years. They are free to air games five days a week and they will continue to spread the MACtion brand in the process all while having the ability to license some games to regional partners.

Sometimes it’s good to be king, unless of course you’re completely freakin’ unhinged – say like Hamlet [yeah, I know he was a prince, but work with me] and, I don’t know, King Midas, that guy who could turn things to gold with his touch.

Come to think of it, Midas is sort of like the NFL. There’s very little that the NFL can do and not make a huge pile of stinking cash in the process. Usually people line up to give them money.

The SEC Network, a joint venture with ESPN, is seven years late to the party. They could, however, be the life of it.

When the channel, which will cover all things related to SEC sports debuts at 5 p.m. today, it will be seven years after the Big Ten Network made its splash.

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany and his partners at Fox were laughed at when they announced they were going to put second tier games from Big Ten teams on a cable network. Critics called it “risky” and said it wouldn’t fly.

Some video providers (Time Warner and Comcast for instance) held out for a while before adding it. And the trickle to add it by smaller systems only came when Appalachian State upset the Michigan Wolverines during the opening week of the college football season.

This is what worried some when talk of autonomy for the Power 5 conferences surfaced in college athletics.

An ESPN poll revealed that the majority of football coaches in those top 65 schools that comprise those conferences would prefer to play only schools in those conferences.

While it would likely eliminate strength of schedule issues when it comes to polling and how it relates to the upcoming college football playoff, it opens an entirely different can of worms for the likes of Mid-American Conference schools such as the University of Akron and Kent State University.

To be honest, we’re talking what it always comes down to in sports - cash. The Power 5 may as well form their own league today, because the Group of 5 (MAC, American, Conference USA, Mountain West and Sun Belt) would be on life support should something like this occur.

Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt told an Israeli newspaper that he fully supports Israel’s current actions in Gaza.

The interview appears in Globes, a business newspaper. An h/t to Deadspin for posting the link.

Blatt, born in America, but immigrated to Israel to begin his basketball career at age 22. Israel has received criticism for the carnage associated with the three-week-old war in which more than 1,200 people, including children, have died, according to reports.

In the interview, Blatt said that it’s Israel’s most justified war to date:

Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Brady Quinn will join Fox Sports to provide analysis in the studio and in the booth, the network announced.

In the studio Quinn, who played in the NFL for six years, will provide analysis for college football on America’s Pregame on Fox Sports 1. He will to the same for Fox Sports Live on that channel.

For college football games he will be paired with Tim Brando for broadcasts and NFL games he will partner with broadcast veteran Dick Stockton.

It has been clear that Quinn has been auditioning for a broadcast role somewhere in recent months, having appeared on assorted broadcast entities. And as required, he had no problem offering an opinion, criticizing Cleveland Browns rookie quarterback Johnny Manziel for his antics off the field.